by Julie Mayhew
The first American on British soil, on any German soil, in over seventy years.
Usually, if there was a U-turn in Party policy, Dad would sit back, calmly assuring us that it was all part of the initial plan, that our leaders always have our best interests at heart, that there is so much information we do not know and cannot know, for our own safety. We must trust in the integrity and higher knowledge of the Führer. This time he stood thumping out angry full stops on the top of the sideboard at the end of every one of Herr Dean’s sentences. Wolf slunk off into the kitchen, his tail curled underneath his backside.
‘I let all that … that … shit … with the HJs and BDMs ride,’ Dad fumed. ‘But this? THIS?’
For me though, I think Herr Dean had started to make sense. He reminded me of Clementine, the way she pulled me up if I ever called myself a ‘world-class skater’. (‘How will you ever know? They might have much better skaters than you in Russia, or Japan, or America.’)
‘How can anyone call themselves an international music star,’ our leader decried, ‘until they have performed to our discerning nation?’
‘What does ‘discerning’ mean?’ Lilli piped up.
‘Perspicacious!’ Dad spat, consonants like bullets. Lilli had no choice but to nod.
Jay Acker needed us, that was what Herr Dean was saying. He wanted to be accepted by us. It had been established that he was of pure blood – so why shouldn’t we let him in? Didn’t we have a duty to let him in? Wasn’t it our mission to rescue him?
Our Führer directed the end of his speech specifically to us – to the school children. (‘For god’s sake,’ Dad scoffed as Dean made this change of address. ‘Bloody poof!’)
‘I think it’s time,’ Herr Dean said, ‘that you, our young people, our future, were given the opportunity to enjoy Jay Acker’s music on our country’s terms, to experience it safely, and to claim it as your own.’
I thought this sounded sort of wonderful but it made Dad kick a chair right across the room. This was when Mum broke her silence, telling Dad to please calm down, thank you very much. But Dad just thrust his finger right in her face and hollered back, ‘That man has stuck his penis into a wasp’s nest!’
What an expression! I wanted to explode with laughter, but I held it back, of course.
‘Daniel!’ Mum gasped.
Lilli took a great big breath ready to ask what a penis was, but I gave her the sternest of stares and she closed her mouth, pretending to zip it shut with her fingers.
The way the nation was run was so important to Dad – more important than to most people. He felt each decision personally, believing it would reflect back on him. I assumed this was because he was the most influential person on the County Roads Estate and was so accustomed to everyone listening to whatever he had to say. When the radio wouldn’t listen back he just couldn’t handle it. How awful for him, I thought, to watch everyone else marching off in the opposite direction.
From then on, the People’s Television bulletins were filled with projected images of what it was going to look like when the stage was up and the crowds filled Trafalgar Square. News came locally that our troop of the HJ and BDM had been chosen as one of the brigades to attend the concert, which meant everyone in the neighbourhood was suddenly thrilled about Herr Dean’s change of plan.
Poor Dad.
They started playing the Jay Acker song on the People’s Radio. It is difficult to put into words how strange this was.
That first time I had almost heard it, that afternoon at Clementine’s house with the stolen CD player, I left the room, desperate not to let any of it get into my ears. Now I was allowed to listen, supposed to listen. It was my first taste of the enemy’s voice. Breathtaking. Like an unexpected prick with a pin.
You have me in your arms
In your prison
Yet I’m feeling free
How can it be
That I’m locked down in your heart
Feeling free-ee-ee?
It was a peculiar sound to get your brain around – an off-key imitation of something familiar that you can’t quite name, as if one of our band’s songs had been fed into a machine and turned into something more, well, fizzy. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Our music was this song made more earthy and real.
But of course it wasn’t just a song, it wasn’t just a boy. It was a movement.
Everything we did from then on, we did to the rhythm of that song. The walk home, washing up, getting undressed, brushing teeth. We marched to its beat. Or rather we strutted, letting our hips fall from side to side as we went. We couldn’t help ourselves. It was such an earworm. Ruby Heigl sang it adoringly to her reflection in the mirror in the BDM toilets. Even GG was humming it. (We called her GG – or rather ‘gee-gee’ – because it was short for Gabi Gubbins but also because a) she liked horses and b) she looked like one too.) And GG was usually as cool as a cucumber about everything.
The girls stuck pictures of Jay Acker in their school lockers, even though he was kind of funny-looking, with his big blonde quiff and falling-down trousers. The boys, meanwhile, started to copy his style. Uniform inspections at the start of BDM and HJ meetings became stupidly drawn-out while one boy or another was made to comb his hair back into a parting and cover up the top of his underpants. Those line-ups were already chaotic enough. As part of the gradual implementation of the Great Integration, line-ups were no longer done in two separate groups. We were mixed up. Boys AND girls. Together. No one could concentrate.
It might have been funny the first few times, watching Dirk foam and splutter through his lecture on how the belt was ‘a VERY FINE INVENTION INDEED’ and should be ‘EMPLOYED AT ALL TIMES,’ but after the fifth retelling …
‘I swear you’ve all gone giddy,’ Fräulein Eberhardt muttered at every available opportunity, patting at her pudding hair.
She was right, of course. Everyone had gone giddy. Giddy and giggly and frothy.
And I really didn’t get it at all.
I wanted to. I faked it for a while – pretending to find Jay Acker’s eyebrows delicious and his vest tops amazing, or whatever it was Angelika and Erica and the rest were all saying. I really wished that I could be carried away on the wave of it all, because it seemed really nice from the outside. But I didn’t get it. Why did they love him so much?
My only consolation: I thought this would bring me closer to Clementine again. She may have had one of Jay Acker’s CDs back when we’d been told not to, but now that it was okay to have one I assumed she’d lose interest. She never acted like the other girls. We would be reunited through our shared disgust for how ridiculous everyone else was behaving.
No.
‘This is just amazing, Jess!’ That was her response to it all. ‘Just unbelievably amazing.’
I went to her house most evenings, to escape Dad and his foul temper. Just when I thought he had calmed down from Herr Dean’s national address, someone from the neighbourhood would ask, ‘So, what do you make of this upcoming concert then, Daniel?’ and he would plummet again, into the fug. I’d take Lilli with me in the evenings, lifting her, warm and drowsy, from her bed, and I’d click Wolf’s lead onto his collar and trail him behind us too.
I sat up in Clementine’s room and listened as she used the word AMAZING in every sentence and I pretended to find it all AMAZING too, until I was too tired to keep up the act.
‘Is it, though? Really? Amazing, I mean,’ I said, eventually.
‘Yes!’ Clementine took hold of my hands. I would have enjoyed this if her eyes hadn’t been wet, filled up with something unfathomable. Mad old women used to cry and cross themselves and fall to their knees at the words of arrogant old popes. We learnt that at school. False idols. ‘This is history happening right now!’ she gasped.
Lilli was sitting on the floor in her mouse-print nightdress, plinking and plonking her way up the white keys on Clementine’s electric piano. I had told Lilli to put the piano onto a table and sit on a chair, away fro
m the floor, but she wouldn’t do as I’d asked. Clementine’s room was like the rest of the Harts’ house: it could have been really, really nice if only they kept it clean and tidy. Herr Hart’s garage was the worst. Lift the up-and-over door and you were likely to start an avalanche.
Clementine and I were up on the bed, which was far from crisp and clean, but it was better than the floor. Wolf had found a patch of something long-ago spilt on the blue carpet and was licking away at the memory of it.
‘If it’s really so amazing why aren’t you playing that CD of yours?’ I said.
‘Can’t, can I?’ she replied.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Forgot.’
The men had come to the Harts’ house last month and carried the machine away (sealed in polythene, to stop the radiation spreading, I presumed).
She gave me a cool stare.
This was where I was supposed to say sorry.
‘It’s just a music concert, though, isn’t it?’ I said to bring an end to the subject. But Clementine hadn’t finished. She started smiling, laugh-talking. I was seven years old again, sitting on her front lawn covered in daisy chains not understanding the concept of ‘soon’.
‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s a million miles away from being just a music concert.’
‘Okay …’
‘This is them,’ she went on, ‘doing their hardest to control something that they just can’t control.’
Them.
‘Control what?’ I asked.
‘People’s desires,’ she replied. ‘Young people’s desires.’
I was lost. Even my best friend in the whole world had been swept away on the sea of it. I imagined explaining this out loud to Clementine. How do you know I’m your best friend in the whole world? she’d say back. There might be much better friends in Russia, or Japan, or America. Or worse, like that day under the tree swing, she’d remind me that we were best friends but nothing more.
Then Clementine used the R-word. Revolution.
What I said in reply was a reflex: ‘I love my country.’
‘I love my country too,’ Clementine replied, but when she said it, it felt like she was talking about an entirely different place. A different planet.
I thought about starting our rescue conversation … Tell me about the place where you used to live, before. But instead I said, ‘He needs us, Clem. That’s all. We’re just doing this boy a favour.’
Lilli started travelling down the keyboard again, using only the wonky, eerie sounds of the black keys. Wolf half-heartedly whined an accompaniment.
Clementine’s face became very serious.
‘No,’ she said, ‘That’s not how it is at all.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘How is it, then?’
She was straight there with the words – giving them to me in German. She took hold of my hands again. ‘Wir brauchen ihn,’ she said. ‘Wir brauchen das.’
We need him. We need this.
I told Dad. Of course I did. I had to tell him everything. That was the rules. Though, in this instance, I didn’t think I wasn’t obeying his orders. I thought I was doing something else when I told him that Clementine was really very excited about the concert, and that she thought it was going to be history in the making, and she also thought that the Jay Acker U-turn was down to the Reich being in a desperate financial state and millimetres away from a potential war, which it just didn’t have the personnel for if another nation were to stick their beak in, so it needed to make friends with America and begin trading, but yet, despite all of this, Clementine was still really very excited about the concert, basically because she thought that it might, possibly, maybe, start a revolution.
When I’d finished, Dad looked up from his newspaper. Mum looked up from her toast. Lilli shrank down into her shoulders.
I had effectively tossed a grenade into the middle of our breakfast table. (Visually assess the distance between you and the enemy, twist free the pin with index finger of non-throwing hand, stand sideways, throw in an arc with an overhand motion.) Or, as Dad might have phrased it, I had stuck my penis into a wasp’s nest. (If only there was such an excellent metaphor using breasts or a vagina.) Supposedly I wanted Dad to calm down about the Jay Acker U-turn. The last thing I wanted to do was make him angry all over again. But still, I had said it. That word – revolution – had infected me somehow. Yet here was the shock: there was no explosion. (Check you have the pin in your hand, take cover, prepare for the enemy to return the grenade before it detonates.)
‘Does she, indeed?’ Dad said, after what felt like the longest and most terrible pause in history. Then he went back to the article he was reading.
That was that.
Mum, though, was clearly still wary of an outburst. The chair that Dad had kicked across the room during the radio broadcast was an heirloom from Oma Davina and was good for nothing now, except possibly barbecue fuel. Oma hadn’t noticed its absence during her last visit, but if another chair went … Mum was more scared of her own mother than of Dad. She began to jam the silence with words.
‘Well, I really have no idea at all why Clementine should be getting so excited,’ she said, trying to be jolly and cross all at the same time, but only sounding desperate and needy, ‘because she certainly won’t be getting an invitation to any concert. Will she? Not now that she’s stopped going to the “Bund”.’ Mum always called it that. ‘Silly girl! I mean, it’s not as if they’re handing out those tickets to people who … To people who have marked themselves out as … People who …’
Mum had wandered into a ‘Zone’. I was sure of it. I could see it in her face, in the way her skin fell slack. She stopped talking.
A ‘Zone’ was just my name for it. I have no clue what word other people used. It’s not as if we went around willy-nilly chatting about the idea. Maybe there never were any ‘Zones’, maybe I made it all up. And even if they did exist – ‘Zones’ – why would that be such a bad thing? The police put tape up sometimes to keep us back for very good reasons. Who wants to stumble down a big gaping hole or tread on a landmine or, I don’t know, discover a corpse?
Though, I realise I have omitted to mention something you might think is really quite crucial. I do know what one other person called the ‘Zones’. Clementine. She called them the truth.
‘To “just anyone”, darling?’ Dad offered, brightly, as an end to Mum’s sentence. He did not lift his gaze from the newspaper.
‘Yes, Daniel,’ Mum said. ‘They won’t give them to “just anyone”.’
And then she let out the huge blimp of air that had wedged itself underneath her ribs and got on with eating her toast.
JANUARY 2013
After Christmas, I found out that I definitely wasn’t “just anyone”.
At a meeting of the HJ and the BDM they announced that our Mädelschaft and Kameradschaft had not only been chosen to attend the concert, but would be performing too. Marching. ON STAGE.
‘Best not to keep going on about it to your dad,’ Mum whispered at bedtime when she came to take away my empty hot chocolate mug. ‘I really can’t do anything with that dining room chair now the leg’s gone and that dresser, well, we’ll just have to live with it as it is.’
I had watched Mum knock out the remaining shards surrounding the hole in the glass of the dresser door, so skilled at making anything look nice and tidy.
‘Oh, okay,’ I said.
‘And best not say anything to Clementine either,’ she added.
‘Because she’ll be jealous?’
‘Yes. Let’s not make it any worse for her than it is.’
But how do you keep that kind of information to yourself? I had been chosen to be part of ‘history happening right now’, as Clementine had described it. If anyone should have been up on that stage, it was her. But I did want it to be me. I couldn’t have cared less about the boy or his music, but I did care about being chosen. Only 500 of us in the whole of the Princely State! Fisher must have recommended me, used my
actual name, when talking to those higher up in the ranks. And we, the selected few, would go on to shake hands with officers, ministers, and maybe, possibly, OUR FÜHRER. This meant that I really was one of the biggest, the brightest and the best. I was fit to burst. So every time I saw Clementine it felt I had the words I HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO MARCH AT JAY ACKER’S CONCERT AND YOU HAVEN’T LA LA LA tattooed across my forehead.
So I avoided Clementine completely. It seemed like the only solution.
This left me with a dilemma, of course – whose house could I escape to in the evenings when there was no BDM meeting? I couldn’t stay at home. Dad was still angrily licking his wounds. He needed space, I told myself. Though I think it was me who I was really scared of. Sometimes, when I was with him, a thought would come into my head – another grenade ready to toss – and I would have to work so hard to stop that thought from getting out via my mouth.
I briefly considered calling on Angelika Baker but I knew that inviting myself into her house, with her five vain sisters, would have been on a par with jumping into a cauldron of cats. An evening of constant lecturing and one-upmanship in the company of Ruby Heigl did not appeal. Ditto, hours of inane chatter and suppressed yawning with Erica Warner. So I slung Lilli across my shoulder and slid through the last of the January slush to GG’s house, my little sister protesting that she was too big to be carried.
‘I just want to stay in bed!’ she told me, shivering, eyelids drooping, thumb in – another thing she was too big for.
‘I’m protecting you, silly,’ I told her.
‘From what, silly?’ she replied. And I found I didn’t really have the answer. But I did have an image, that chair of Oma Davina’s flying across the room, missing Lilli’s head by a matter of centimetres.
GG’s mother looked worried when she first opened the door to me, Lilli and Wolf. She looked down at herself, disappointed and sort of surprised in what she found herself wearing.
